No Hugging: Are We Living Through a Crisis of Touch?

CHILD AWKWARD DOCTOR TEACHER MILLION LEAST HEALTH BABY YEAR SOCIAL HEART GIVE NATURAL FOUNDER

   When did you last ___ someone outside your family ___ intimate relationship? Touch is ___ first sense humans develop. ___ somewhere in adulthood what ___ instinctive to us as ___ has come to feel ___. In countless ways social ___ is being eliminated from ___ lives.

   In the UK ___ were warned last month ___ avoid comforting patients with ___ to avoid legal action. ___ hesitate to touch pupils. ___ in the UK, in ___ loneliness epidemic, half a ___ older people go at ___ five days a week ___ touching a person.

   What ___ humans risk losing when ___ lose touch? Francis McGlone, ___ leader in affective touch, ___ worried: “We have demonised ___ to a level at ___ it provokes hysterical responses ___ this lack of touch ___ not good for mental ___,” he says.

McGlone says, “___ pleasantness of touch encourages ___ to keep touching, pleasing ___ and connecting adults. Last ___ researchers from London showed ___ slow gentle stroking by ___ stranger reduced feelings of ___ exclusion. As a society ___ instinctively understand the power ___ touch. Caressing slows down ___ beats and blood pressure, ___ people better control over ___ stress hormones. Being touched ___ increases the number of ___ killer cells”.

   “You just ___n’t see people touching each ___ these days,” Tiffany Field, ___ of the Touch Research Institute, complains. There is still no scientific data to connect declining touch to mobile technology or social media, but Field’s descriptions of people wrapped in their own worlds rather than each other, sitting in isolation, are evocative and familiar.

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Have fun....and take care! 263 JUN-A-2018